


another fall

by apotheosizing



Category: Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Genre: Angst, M/M, Melancholy, Pining, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25519366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apotheosizing/pseuds/apotheosizing
Summary: It is foolish to love someone who is, by their own hand, doomed, but Mephistopheles has always been a fool.
Relationships: John Faustus/Mephistopheles
Comments: 9
Kudos: 37
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	another fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dreamlikedulcimer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamlikedulcimer/gifts).



> These two have been an otp of mine for y e a r s but I was always hesitant to write for them out of concern that I wouldn't be able to effectively portray what I loved about them so much. But when I saw them nominated for this exchange it turned out to be the little push I needed to give it a shot and write some good old unresolved pining based on your first prompt/idea (with a little sprinkle of the second).
> 
> I hope you enjoy this little piece!

Under the wan light of the moon, the eyes of the man who had summoned him glittered like beetles. He stared, breathless with the effort of magic, up at him from the edge of the circle of chalk and wax as the realization that it had worked twisted his expression into smug triumph. He did not gaze upon his true demonic form with fear as he bid him take a more seemly shape, as though he could impose his will upon Hell itself. It was then that Mephistopheles knew this man was doomed.

Imperious, the good doctor sent him to his lord seeking to barter his soul for what little power Lucifer would deign to bestow. Mephistopheles returned precisely at the stroke of midnight, offered him the dagger, and watched impassive as ever as Faustus' very veins begged him to stop what he was doing. He had not begged since he stood before Him, contrite and terrified in the moments before his punishment was set down, and he would never do so again, knowing its futility.

The mask of disinterest slipped and shattered when Faustus said, all bravado, that Hell was a mere fable. He was content to serve silently at the elbow of the damned who knew himself so but such depths of self-deception he could not abide. He told his new master of the truth of the horrors of Hell, pain and emptiness so deep that the tortures inflicted by hot pokers and gnashing teeth would be a blessing in comparison. Faustus had the audacity to laugh away his dire portents, the earthly pleasures promised by the next four-and-twenty years more immediate than the eternity of suffering he had chosen.

It was this, that he had damned himself without an inkling of what that meant, that drove them apart even as something undeniable ran between them, deeper than the blood that bound their bargain. They circled each other for years in this confusing orbit - Faustus intrigued by it and Mephistopheles feigning obliviousness to it - like the celestial bodies of which they had spoken in their discussions of the only heavens either could contemplate.

Mephistopheles knew its name, though he hesitated to admit it even to himself until one dark night in Campania. The stars themselves turned their eyes from him as he wandered the grounds of the generous duke's estate, thinking with bitterness of the way the duke's touch had lingered on his doctor's shoulder and of the incessant appearances of the angel who entreated Faustus to repent and embrace the forgiveness he had never been offered.

He did not dare call it a prayer but he had hoped for months that he could drown himself in resentment enough to douse the feeling that had slowly eclipsed it. Even this newfound covetousness of more than his Faustus' soul he knew and would welcome in comparison to what he could no longer its proper name - _love_. Love, which he had once thought had turned to ash with his wings in the fall, an awful echo of the love that had been all he'd known in Heaven. He loved this fool who had abandoned the promise of everlasting love for the fleeting fruits of knowledge, like Eve before him. He loved him despite his arrogance, his callousness, his insatiability, and worse he loved him _for_ those things.

Mephistopheles wondered, as he moved unseen past the servant who sat at the back step, washing linens with fingers worked to the bone, if this was some new torment from above or below. A sharp ache that pained him more deeply than the old hurts that he had inflicted in his old rebellion to remind him of the perfect love he had willingly forsaken. It was enough to pull the old false hopes from his traitorous heart, as he entertained the worn fantasy of a true defiance of his lord with his doctor by his side. He could spare such delusional thoughts little more than a bitter laugh, knowing that they would never get that far.

He returned to the lavishly appointed guest chambers as dawn began to break, waiting in silence for his Faustus to wake. Each grain of sand in the hourglass pained him, the short remainder of a decade slipping away in a mockery of his night's contemplation. He considered the merits of confessing his wandering thoughts to the doctor, weighed ten years of fleeting bliss against the pain of losing something real between them rather than something imagined when his fellows dragged his soul to hell, against the betrayal in Faustus' eyes when his love could do nothing to save him. He did not voice them, even to his doctor's sleeping form. Here, if nowhere else, he would deny him and spare them both the pain.

He could spare Faustus from little else of what was to come.


End file.
